Design, Tech, Art, and Business

Design Jobs That Are Prone to Die Out (or not)

It wasn’t until recently that we saw a new emergence of User-Experience design. With tech advancing so rapidly, new departments are created to adapt to new design roles.

For example, it wasn’t until the last decade that we saw an uproar in UX design. Currently, they are among the most in-demand designers working today. However, according to a post featured by the Industrial Designer of Society Association, UX designers will soon be out of jobs…

Global design industries will diminish certain roles as we know them, but will also create new roles and titles such as Specialist Materials Designers.

Which, according to Yvonne Lin of 4B Collective believes that in the near future, there will be a growing need for designers who can work in and across different types of materials. For example, she sees bamboo architects as being an up-and-coming design field, as the Western world embraces “the possibilities of a weight-bearing material that can grow three feet in 24 hours and can be bent, laminated, joined, and stripped.”

She also says that designers who can sew will soon be in hot demand to create structural soft goods. What’s a structural soft good? Think of the kind of wearables that are as much tech as textile.

Or better yet, the creation of the “Post-Industrial Designer.” What’s key to staying alive as an industrial designer amidst the digital revolution?

Hybridization.

5 Design Jobs that will Die

UX Designers, as aforementioned, have become too broad and muddled of a role, according to Teague designers.

Visual Designers, are responsible for the way an app looks. UX, meanwhile, concentrates on how it feels.

Design Researcher’s roles are now evolving into a fundamental skill and practice for all designers.

Design Chief Officers, an executive-level design figurehead, are redundant. All executives are to be design practitioners.

Traditional Industrial Designers are now equipped to design for the internet of things.

Markus Wierzoch, industrial design director at Artefact says that classically trained industrial designers who remain too attached to the “industrial” parts of their profession— overly focused on the sculptural look of a product—will become, in his words, “designosaurs.”

The primary reason for so much change is the fact that all designers are expected to be hybrids nowadays. “The classically trained industrial designer is dying off soon,” says Doreen Lorenzo, director of integrated design at UT Austin.

Technologies of today, will change design jobs–they will start to be augmented by algorithmic visual approaches. An AI tool can already provide designers with 100’s of layout variations based on style-definition or high-level templates.

We can best explain this hybridization via jobs projected to grow in the design field…there’s a similarity in the new roles expected to flourish.

The designers of today must understand the inter-connectivity of design.

7 Design Jobs Expected to Grow

Virtual Interaction Designers, much like the algorithmic models, virtual reality is an emerging technology!

Specialist Materials Designers will have the skill and knowledge gap between the soft- and hard-good world.

Algorithmic/ Artificial Intelligence Design Specialists duh!

Design Strategists are expected to see a growth because of the complexity of communication chains.

Organization Designers will be the new UX Designers and organizing flow charts helping rebrand digital content.

Freelance Designers will more opportunity than ever before of algorithmic models and AI technologies.